Well, it's almost that time of the year again. My badges arrived (plural because I wasn't able to get a 3-day before they sold out so I bought three one-day badges...) and the panel schedule is up, so I'm starting to think about what to do this year.

I guess I'll ask if there's anyone else here planning on attending, but the answer is usually no ;)

Oh well, I'll probably do my usual thing of posting short summaries here of anything that I think might be of interest to this crowd. Should be fun.

If you want to go you have to be on the ball. Tickets usually go on sale around April or so, and they sold out in under a day this year. And it's only going to get worse. They can't make it any bigger unless they move it because the convention center is already at its maximum capacity. Pretty crazy. I remember when PAX just had a couple thousand people at a much smaller venue over in Bellevue.

Man, I hate to say this but I've been going to PAX for years now and even though sometimes before the show I'm kind of skeptical about the whole thing I have always quickly found something to entertain myself. But this year I walked around the exhibition hall filled with nothing but apathy. All I see are shooters, shooters, shooters and free-to-play/social garbage. It's possible I might have missed something, but I seriously don't think there's even one single-player RPG from a major publisher at the show this year (there is some indie stuff at least). Unless Borderlands 2 counts, though that's still too much shooter for my tastes. And even if I wanted to try it the line for it was like 5 miles long, so screw that.

Wait, I have to correct myself. Sony had a section dedicated to the Vita and there were a couple units with Persona 4 Golden on them. So there was one RPG, that's a port, and it wasn't even being shown by the publisher.

I did play some Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale...not much to say about it. It's a Smash Bros. clone. I do think people who haven't played it complain about the kills-with-supers mechanic a bit too much. It seems to work.

Also played Metal Gear Rising. That's an interesting thing. Feels very much more Platinum than Metal Gear--at least from what I saw--though that isn't necessarily a bad thing in my opinion. The cutting mechanic is cool.

Then I played a demo of the new D&D MMORPG Neverwinter (no, not Neverwinter Nights) which was so boring I nearly walked out in the middle of it. But I didn't have anything better to do anyway, so I kept at it and won by holding down attack (OK, they did say they lowered the difficulty for the demo, but still...I literally just stood there and held down attack). Then they gave me a beta key, which I'm not going to use, so does anyone want it?

Otherwise, I went to panels and hung out at indie booths. Thank god for indie devs. Not only are their games more interesting, but the developers themselves are usually there and are eager to talk about them.

Speaking of panels and indie devs, there was a great panel on indie RPGs, which included Robert Boyd from Zeboyd Games. Nice job, I really enjoyed it.

There are actually a lot of panels I want to see tomorrow so that will probably be most of my day.

Well, the show is over. I'm a feeling a little less down about the whole thing than my previous post implies, though there really was a complete lack of single-player RPGs. Still, I got to play some cool stuff:

X-Com Enemy Unknown: Game of the show. A true hardcore strategy game. I am so looking forward to this.

Hawken: Pretty fun once I got the hang of it. But I know there's a beta floating around so I guess a lot of people already know that.

Tomb Raider (the reboot): Same as the E3 demo you've probably all ready about. But I finally got to shoot that deer everyone is talking about (and I got it in two shots, both of which hit but the first wasn't fatal). Much of the game feels very Uncharted-y, but there are some open areas with more exploration than you typically see in an Uncharted game.

Okami HD: I've played the heck out of Okami already so I mainly wanted to try this because they were demoing it with Move controls and I was kind of curious how well that worked. My conclusion: stick with a dualshock.

Persona 4 Golden: Yes I went and played it. Yes it's just like Persona 4. They had what appeared to be an early build of the whole game and they were just started people at the beginning. Yes, you heard me correct. If you've played Persona 4 you should immediately realize why that makes for a terrible, terrible demo. I love the game but there's like 3 hours of cutscenes before you get to your first combat encounter...

Phantasy Star Online 2: I actually enjoyed this more than I thought I would. Feels much more action-based and less pure stat munching than most MMORPGs. Looks pretty too.

They had a bunch of Vita units at Sony's booth with a lot of different games and I gave several of them a whirl without really spending a lot of time with them, including LittleBigPlanet, the new Sly Cooper, Dokuro, and Little King's Story. But I don't have a lot to say about them.

I also spent some time trying out tabletop games this PAX, which I don't usually do since they're a big time sink but I do love tabletop games. There was some fun stuff.

It's seemed like a decent puzzle platformer, but didn't really strike me as anything special. Basically your job is to escort the princess from one end of each map to the other, but the princess is quite dumb in a predictable Lemmings sort of way. She will happily walk of cliffs if you let her. Most of the puzzles revolve around pushing blocks, activating switches, etc. to make a safe path for her. There's some light combat too, but it's not the focus. What I played was pretty easy, but it was also the beginning of the game where you expect things to be easy. I can't comment beyond that.

On another note, nobody has taken me up on the Neverwinter beta code offer. OK, I wasn't exactly praising the game, but maybe the real thing would be better. I don't plan on using it, though, so the code is still available for the first person who wants it.

Did you do any of the non video game related stuff like D&D Next or anything?

Logged

All right, we are going to use a fan brush here and uh why don't you take some hunter green and we are going to put a happy little bush right down over here in the corner there and that'll just be our little secret and if you tell anyone that that bush is there I will come to your house and I will cut you.

Did you do any of the non video game related stuff like D&D Next or anything?

Didn't do any D&D Next but I did playtest a couple indie RPGs (including a not-yet-published one based on Atomic Robo which was pretty cool). Also went to the pre-PAX boardgame night which was a ton of fun.

Did you do any of the non video game related stuff like D&D Next or anything?

Didn't do any D&D Next but I did playtest a couple indie RPGs (including a not-yet-published one based on Atomic Robo which was pretty cool). Also went to the pre-PAX boardgame night which was a ton of fun.

That's cool. One of my friends was DMing D&D next

Logged

All right, we are going to use a fan brush here and uh why don't you take some hunter green and we are going to put a happy little bush right down over here in the corner there and that'll just be our little secret and if you tell anyone that that bush is there I will come to your house and I will cut you.